Tech

If not, then probably not.

On the nineteenth anniversary of its release, Nerd World sat down with Billy Joel at his Sagaponack home to discuss the cultural impact of his classic song.
NERD WORLD: I just listened to the song again. It’s amazing how well it’s held up. All those things have still happened.
BILLY JOEL: Thanks, it’s a really special song to me. …

I’m not old enough to remember Good Bobby Fischer. He beat Spassky in Iceland in 1972, when I was 3. I more got Bad Bobby Fischer — you know, the guy who hated Jews (is that why CNN calls him a “world-class eccentric”? That’s one way to put it) and periodically had passport problems.

I guess I should feel bad for him, since he almost …

It’s being widely reported that Hasbro has asked Facebook to kill Scrabulous, a third-party app for playing Scrabble online.

Scrabulous is insanely popular — it claims around half a million users daily. More important, Scrabulous is insanely popular with me: I never have fewer than 3 games going at once. (And I never, ever cheat.) It’s …

I didn’t do this interview with J.J. Abrams, producer of Cloverfield, creator or co-creator of Felicity, Alias, Lost and all the stars in the heavenly firmament. The exceptionally sharp interlocutor here is Rebecca Winters Keegan, Time’s Hollywood correspondent. This is for a piece in the next issue of Time about end-of-the-world movies, …

I’m covering MacWorld from the relative safety of midtown Manhattan this year, which means compulsively reloading various livebloggers’ websites. Glamorous! I gambled that CES would be dull this year and won. Let’s see how I do with MacWorld.

As usual, the keynote started slow. Leopard, yay. iPhone updates, yay. Movie rentals, HD, yay, …

Deck the halls and ’tis the season for that most wonderful time of year! It’s me, Carla Jean Moss, and can you believe it’s been a year since my last Christmas Letter? Where did the time go? It’s been a crazy year, I tell you that. But I guess I say that every year.

First off, we had a lot of action the Terrell County Wal-Mart. …

Elijah Wood said a thing or two to MTV News about what’s going on with the Hobbit movie. Which it turned out means the Hobbit movies, plural. This is Wood describing his conversations with Peter Jackson:

I haven’t spoken to him directly about it [but] I’ve e-mailed him, and as far as I know the two films that they’re doing, one

…

Hey there, it’s me, the Blob. The thousand-pound guy in the unitard. Well, I’m here to stand up for an oppressed minority, of which I am one of them: Giant Fatsos.

Giant Fatsos get the blame for everything these days. First, it was the skyrocketin’ costs a healthcare, then we was wreckin’ the rainforest, and now they’re blamin’ …

Not only did I read some manga, I got it from my mom. If I wasn’t a nerd before I think that seals the deal.

I had always avoided manga till now. I would see the books lying around, but they’re kind of off-putting. They’ve got all these symbols and icons on them, all that kanji, and the paper quality is so awful, and they have words …

I’m not like Matt. I don’t sit around watching movies and striking for causes I believe in. I work for a living. Or I do now that I’m back from leave.

One thing I don’t do anymore is go to a lot of tech trade shows. Used to. Used to be I’d haul-ass off to Las Vegas for a week of vaporware and mini-bar booze and bad air and jolie-laide …

I went to see The Golden Compass recently, and before the movie they showed the trailers for the following upcoming films: The Spiderwick Chronicles, Inkheart, and The Forbidden Kingdom. Wait a minute… oh, I get it. Because I go to a fantasy movie, I only get ads for other fantasy movies? There’s a word for that: bigotry. And …